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What Is The Wealthy Affiliate University? – An Honest Wealthy Affiliate Review

Did you ever think about going to university? Why don’t you try the Wealthy Affiliate (WA) University? This is what I did and here is my story:

In a nutshell WA is an online platform and community that teaches you how to get started to build your online business. Besides the training you have various tools and other kind of support which I will explain in detail.

Starting out online can be dire if you get into the clutches of a fraudster. And before you even get started you may end up disappointed and miss a great opportunity in your life.

If you don’t plan to have your own online business, this review may not be for you, but I encourage you to avoid hasty conclusion without being properly informed.

So what about Wealthy Affiliate, does it work?

Well, at least you see the result in front of you (I am talking about the website :-)).

So let’s go right into the details and get a better understanding. Here is what you will learn in this review:

WA Approach To Make Money Online

What You Will Get – A Walk-Through

Let’s talk about results – Do WA students succeed?

Pros and Cons

Starting Your Online Business

WA Approach To Make Money Online

At WA you will learn how to setup your own website and what you can do to earn money from it. Having a website is essential for basically any type of business. It is the representation of your business in the internet. If you want to generate a passive income online, you can hardly do so without having your own website. You could also try to start your own YouTube channel, or on Facebook, but sooner or later you would need to know how to get your own website in place. With your website already in place, it is much easier to spread out on other platforms.

In order to get started you would have to follow these steps:

Niche Selection: This is the main topic that you are going to address with your website. This could be literally anything you can think of. At WA you will learn how you can select a niche and what you have to consider in doing so. Every niche corresponds to a group of people that are looking for just that type of information.

Domain Name: Once you have selected your niche, you will have to make sure that you find a proper domain name. This will be the URL that you see in your browser and that serves as your internet address (in my case: holisticlifetransformation.com). Besides being related to your niche, it can already contain a keyword that will help you to get found in the search engines.

Website Setup: Now that you have your domain, it is time to build your website. At WA you get 2 domains in the starter membership, so that you get an idea about the whole process. On the SiteRubix platform, which is part of WA, you get all the technical website support, website hosting, and even the possibility to purchase your own domain name. The software that is used to build your website is called WordPress. It significantly simplifies the website building process so that you can focus more on content creation without the need to have programming skills. If this sounds complicated, don’t worry. At WA everything will be explained to you in the first training module, which is for free. When I started, I didn’t know anything about website development.

Content Creation: Once you have your website in place, you will have to regularly writing fresh and valuable content. Besides providing valuable information, you will have to take care of proper keyword selection in order to get found in Google or Bing. If you are not a writer, or think that you have nothing to write about then I can tell you: Don’t worry. You know more than you are aware of and once you start learning more about your niche, you will find easily topics to write about. And the writing process itself becomes also easier over time. It is just a matter of practice.

Social Sharing: After you have created some content you can spread out the news on various available social media which will bring you more traffic to your website.

This is a process that obviously takes some time and shouldn’t overwhelm you. First of all you have to make a decision if you want to walk on this path and set a goal that you want to achieve. After that, you will have to proceed one step at a time, everyday a little bit more. And I can tell you that you will be surprised how fast you can setup something that you created. This alone can be a very rewarding experience and I can tell you that it is definitely worth the effort.

But after all, you want to get some money as well, right? At WA you will learn everything about affiliate marketing. You may know already what it is about. In case you don’t, you will find an explanation below. For me the concept itself was not new, but I simply wasn’t consciously aware of it. And I was stunned to see the internet with a totally different point of view after I saw the training. I soon found out that almost everyone is using it in one way or another.

It basically boils down to getting paid a commission for referring people to buy a certain product or service. This concept has been used for decades before the internet was even invented but I simply didn’t draw the line to connect the dots.

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is basically what you are doing when you setup your website. You kind of promote products that you don’t even need to own. If one of your visitors buys the product or service after clicking on your link, you will be paid a commission.

The customer has no disadvantage to buy from you because he will pay the same price, or might even get a discount if you can provide it. Further, he finds the information that he was looking for neatly presented on your website which itself is free. The product owner has to share his profit but is of course happy to sell more of his products or services without the need to advertise his products. And for you it is a way to get indirectly paid for the service that you offer for your visitors. So ideally you have a win-win situation for everyone.

Over time and with increasing authority and expertise in your niche you could even start to create your own either physical or electronic products like an e-book, paid membership or course.

With your website traffic increasing and your store always being open to billions of internet users you can make money while you sleep. But in order to get there you will have to do your homework first. Remember, without providing real value to anyone, you will not be able to get anything back. You first have to give in order to receive back. If you make it a habit to give always more than you would have to then you will soon live a life full of abundance, because IT HAS to come back to you.

What You Will Get – A Walk-Through

Below I created a video in which I will walk you through the WA signup process and show you how the member area looks like.

My Account

Below you see a screenshot of my private account.

My WordPress Admin Area for Holistic Life Transformation

This is the WordPress editor from which you build and manage your website. You have access to your website via the SiteRubix platform within Wealthy Affiliate. Alternatively you can login with your login details from WordPress as well. Throughout the training you will be taught step by step what you have to do, so don’t worry if you have never heard of WordPress before.

Starter vs. Premium Membership

Here you find the comparison between the Starter and the Premium Membership. The first month of the Premium Membership costs $19. After that it is $47 per month.

Notice that you pay only about $29 per month for Premium, if you decide to use the yearly membership. This will be offered to you after you go for Premium!

This is less than $1 per day which is more than fair considering all what you get in return. This is what I used to do and I don’t regret it.

Let’s talk about results – Do WA students succeed?

Currently, there are more than 700,000 members on Wealthy Affiliate. However, I believe that over the years many of the accounts have been abandoned and are not used anymore. This does not mean that those people stopped working on their online business or are not successful. They could have just stopped using WA. But it indicates that the number of active members is probably lower than the number of registered members.

On the other hand you can find many stories of people writing either about making their first money online or having other success stories to share with you.

How long does it take to make money?

At the end this is entirely up to you. You can be lucky and make your first money after two months, or six months, or after one year. For me it is not important to make my first sale as fast as possible but rather as sustainable as possible. My intention is to generate a consistent passive income over time and I am willing to spend more time in the beginning to build a solid foundation.

On the other hand, you should see your website as a business, and if it is not profitable over a long time than you may need to improve or adapt yourself or your business and make it more efficient and attractive to your visitors.

Not a get rich scheme

There is definitely a point when people get discouraged and tend to give up. But at this point it is not Wealthy Affiliate to blame or the proven approach you are taught in creating a successful online business. WA is a tool or better a toolbox with many valuable items. But in the end you are responsible for using them wisely and to your advantage. If you get stuck somewhere, there is a huge community to provide you with support and motivation.

See your website as a long term investment that needs time and effort on your part. It is like a tree that you plant. It needs water, sun, nutrition and fertilizer to grow. After it has grown sufficiently, the tree will supply you with plenty of fruits over and over again. See your website as the tree and WA as the garden or patch providing all tools and preconditions that you need to succeed.

You are the gardener responsible for the tree or in our case, your website. Give yourself and your business the time it needs to take off and pay you back. If you think that it is too hard, don’t blame WA or the world for being unfair, but instead yourself for not being good enough. This is what I am doing and it keeps me going and constantly looking for ways that improve my website, make me work more efficiently, and keep me motivated to work towards my goals. If you think you have tried everything, you are wrong, just give it one more try until you succeed.

When you study the biographies of successful people you will realize that they all had to face some struggles at one point in their life. Only after facing and overcoming them they became successful. So simply keep going and never give up and success will come!

Pros and Cons

Here I will list some of the positive and the negative aspects of Wealthy Affiliate. The positive aspects outweigh the negative ones by far, but nothing is perfect:

Pros

+ Structured step by step training that addresses all the essentials of a successful online business

+ Extra training provides detailed additional information that you will need at one point or another

+ Honesty over personal gains: It is stated over and over again that search engines such as Google and Bing honor valuable and honest information, in order to get you ranked. It is advised against using any black hat techniques, which is a big plus in my opinion.

+ Experience and stories of other WA members can help you to: stay inspired and motivated, keep you on track to reach your goals, adjust your working attitude, make you more efficient, give you valuable insights

+ Give and Take Attitude: Be ready to give others first and more than you have to instead of only taking only what you need. This applies not only to the training at WA and towards other WA members (which has been a very important lesson to me) but also to how you should see your entire online business. Enter the law of exchange by giving others first. Be the cause for the exchange that you want to receive. Remember: Currency is energy/exchange; No Exchange = No Currency ==> NO MONEY!

+ Comments and Feedback: Giving comments and feedback to others not only helps you to get comments and feedback in return. It inspires you by visiting other people’s websites and their approach to certain topics. This can be very helpful for your own inspiration but also teach you valuable lessons in whatever they write about. I bookmarked many websites of other members for later consultation and found helpful tools and ideas just by commenting on their posts. Receiving comments and feedback in return helps you to deal with other opinions, criticism, but also compliments. It can be a huge confidence boost when people actually like what you have to say and the way you present it.

+ Spirit of optimism and entrepreneurship: Everyone at WA is actually a creator and trying to build his own success foundation. This creates synergies and uplifting forces for all members. It changed the way I see the world: Instead of being a consumer who needs stuff and wants to save money, I have become a creator with focus on new business opportunities and ideas for my projects and see the world with the eyes of an entrepreneur, which is a much more positive and optimistic view on the world.

+ Transfer of websites possible: In case you have a website already, you can import your websites to WA. If you want to quit WA you can easily transfer your websites to other hosting providers. You have 30 days to move your domains. This does not apply to domains belonging to SiteRubix (yourdomain.siterubix.com). However, you can always export your website content and upload it on another domain using WordPress.

Cons

– Other business models are not part of the training: When you look for ways to make money outside of WA, you will find hundreds of possibilities. Many of them are actually scams or frauds but some are not. Creating a business e.g. with YouTube or Facebook are not part of the certification course, which in my opinion is also a way to get started. However, you will find training on WA about it from other users, if you keep looking for it.

– You cannot downgrade to Starter Membership: Once you are a Premium Member you cannot downgrade to Starter again. It is possible to stop paying without problems and to put your account at rest. However, you will be a Premium Member again if you decide to come back later.

– Tons of training materials can be confusing: It is actually a pro to have so much training, but as you start out you can easily get lost in it and even find contradicting opinions, because other WA members may have varying opinions about certain topics. Hence, I recommend to stick to the Certification Course and to the weekly video training that are always of high quality and insightful information.

Starting Your Online Business

When you are looking for a way to make an income from the internet you can easily spend hundreds of Dollars without achieving anything except debiting your credit card.

If you are the kind of person attracting people that try to steal you money, you better make your research before starting out. Make sure you invest your money wisely.

I was lucky enough finding Wealthy Affiliate right from the start, thus, avoiding any scams before starting out with my online business. However, I had my share of bad experiences with other products in the past as well.

Investing in your future

Many times people say that they don’t want to spend money or that they think that it is too expensive. But ask yourself this:

How much money do you spend in one month on things that you actually don’t need? How much time do you spend in one month on things that are actually a waste of time?

With the yearly membership costing about $1 per day (this are $7 a week) where could you safe that money and start building your business? I am sure that you somehow could keep that money on one end and invest it on the other if you really want to.

How much time and money are you willing to invest into your future and your dreams?

See the difference between spending and investing!

When you spend your money on something it is gone, thus, reducing your financial wealth without it ever coming back. This is the typical behavior of the majority of the people. They are just consumers and spend all of their money or even more than they have on things that they don’t need to get nowhere fast. At the end they keep wondering why they never have enough money and have to keep working so hard all of the time.

When you invest your money on something it is gone for now but ideally your investment will pay off in the future. This is what the rich people do, they invest their money and time on things that serve them. Starting your online business is an investment in your future. You stop being a consumer and start becoming a producer. You actually can create and add value to the world by doing what you like.

Investing in an online business is actually much cheaper than going for an “offline” business. Theoretically, you can reach everyone with an internet access 24/7 and you don’t even need your own products to start with! Your financial risk is almost negligible compared to starting out with a real business. Furthermore, when things are going well you still can establish your own physical or electronic products.

Investing in yourself is an integral part in becoming your greatest version which is the core objective of this website. If you are not ready to enter the law of exchange by investing in yourself, how can you ever expect to get something back in return? This applies for all areas of your life and simply doesn’t work because it would be against the cosmic principles. Money is currency, thus meant to be in flow as a means of exchange. Without being exchanged, money has no value!

The best thing is that you don’t need to spend a single dime and can try it for free. So this is again absolutely risk free!

So What Is The Wealthy Affiliate University?

It is a very powerful tool to start your online business, which in turn can help you on your way in becoming your greatest version. However, you are 100% responsible for the success of your online business. WA is not to blame here because it provides everything you need: technical tools and support, step by step starter tutorials, additional training, community support, classrooms and an affiliate program. It is up to you to use it and make it profitable.

How much are you willing to invest in yourself?

The biggest failure in my opinion is to not even try it, because you have nothing to lose.

So there you have it. You have everything you need to know in order to get started. Whatever you decide, choose wisely and move ahead with confidence.

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About Rene

My name is Rene, I was born in Germany and have an engineering background. I like to understand why certain things work the way they do and why we act in a certain way.

Since I can read and understand more complex topics I have been interested in topics others wouldn't bother too much about and in becoming my greatest version.

I started this website in spring 2016 after I realized that there is more in life than just having a job and a career plan. So I made the decision to change my life and to share my story with you by starting this website.

My intention is to help as many people with their problems by showing them how they can help themselves. Sometimes all it takes is someone telling us that we are on the right path and are doing just fine.

I cannot present you the undisputed truth but I try to tell you what works for me or just FEELS right to write and think. Please feel free to share your thoughts and ideas as well if you wish.

Change your life now!

Get back on track with this inspiring collection

Success! Before the subscription is complete, you need to confirm your subscription (This is just to protect you from someone signing you up without your permission.) Now check your email to confirm your subscription

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